[matthewmcg]

He says it a few paragraphs in: “To give a sense of how strange this is, here is the only “officially sanctioned” way to represent a multistage thermonuclear weapon, according to US Department of Energy guidance since the 1990s:

Figure 13.9, “Unclassified Illustration of a Staged Weapon (Source: TCG-NAS-2, March 1997),” from the Nuclear Matters Handbook 2020 (Revised), published by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters.

Two circles in a box, maybe inside of a reentry vehicle. That’s it. Nothing that gives any actual sense of size, location, materials, physicality.”

[gnfargbl]

If the story here is that the US DoE is now implicitly confirming common public-domain knowledge that can be found immediately on Wikipedia then sure, that's a story of minor interest. That story is nothing like the title of the blog, though!

[bathtub365]

One thing to keep in mind is that the author’s interest lies in the nature of nuclear secrecy, and not necessarily the secrets themselves. It’s a subtle distinction but I think explains why the author finds the fact that this type of diagram was officially released by a national lab interesting, even if the information has previously made its way to the public domain in other unofficial ways.

[lazide]

speculation can be found on Wikipedia, perhaps accurate speculation, perhaps not.

DoE contractors leaking details that confirm that speculation would indeed be a big deal, and might well save adversaries some real time and mistakes they’d otherwise make.

[snowwrestler]

Unless he is actually employed in the classification process inside these agencies, he does not know everything that is officially sanctioned. It’s all guesswork, from the outside.

[why_only_15]

To some degree this is true, but he’s also FOIA’d documents that describe what’s officially sanctioned.

[nativeit]

That’s kind of the point isn’t it?